Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

Adam Smith left Oxford “for good” in August of 1746,^[1] and he eventually “fixed his residence at Edinburgh,”^[2] where he began to deliver a series of “freelance lectures on English composition and literary criticism” somewhere in the Athens of the North.^[3]But what was the college dropout doing during the span of time between his departure from Oxford in August of 1746 and his move to Edinburgh in 1748? Also, when did Smith make his fateful move to Edinburgh? If it was not until the summer or fall of 1748, a total of two years might be “lost”!

Alas, Smith’s biographers are of no help. To begin, all we are told in Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith is that, “[a]fter a residence at Oxford of seven years” (i.e. July 1740 to August 1746), the young Smith “returned to Kirkcaldy, and lived two years with his mother; engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life” and that “he resolved to return to his own country, and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments, to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.”^[4]

Smith’s other oft-cited biographer, John Rae, adds one extra detail to Stewart’s bare-bones account of Smith’s lost years. Rae reports that “Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, but his name remained on the Oxford books for some months after his departure, showing apparently that he had not on leaving come to a final determination against going back.”^[5] So, was the young Smith planning on possibly returning to his formal studies at Balliol College at some point? If so, he must have changed his mind, for according to Rae, “Smith concluded that the best prospect for him was after all the road back to Scotland. And he never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.”^[6]

Neither Nicholas Phillipson (2010) nor Ian Simpson Ross (2010), however, shed any light on this chapter of Smith’s life. In fact, both biographers skip the year 1747 altogether. The only thing Ross (2010, p. 74), for example, has to say is that Smith “went back to Kirkcaldy” in 1746 and then “went off to do the work that led to his world fame as a man of letters.”^[7] Phillipson (2010, p. 72) is even more terse. He simply tells us that “Smith left Oxford in late August 1746 and returned to Scotland” before changing the subject to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46 and proceeding to describe Henry Home’s “instrumental [role] in launching Smith’s career in 1748 by means of an invitation to deliver two series of lectures in the capital [Edinburgh], on rhetoric and on jurisprudence.”^[8] 

For his part, E. G. West (1969, p. 44), without citing any supporting evidence, claims that Adam Smith spent these lost years writing some of the essays that would later be published posthumously in Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects: “Much of these two years [i.e. 1746 to 1748] he spent writing. It is probable that in this period he wrote some of the belles-lettres and the essays on astronomy, ancient physics, logic and metaphysics.”^[9] But to quote Glory Liu (2022, p. xvii): “Smith left Oxford for Scotland in 1746. We know next to nothing of what happened between then and 1748 ….” In short, most of Smith’s biographers simply leapfrog from Smith’s decision to ditch Oxford in August of 1746 directly into Smith’s fateful move to Edinburgh in 1748.

But what happened in 1747? How did a college dropout with no prospects become a leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, the man who would change the world by bringing down mercantilism and championing free trade?

^[1] Ross 2010, p. 67. Ian Simpson Ross (ibid., p. 73) also tells us, “His departure from Balliol occurred during the third week of August 1746, when his last charge for ‘Battels’ was entered (Battel Books, 23, 2).”

^[2] Stewart 1980, p. 272 (EPS, I.11).

^[3] Ross 2010, p. 78. Although our focus in this chapter is Smith’s lost year (1747), his Edinburgh period (1748 to 1751) and his freelance Edinburgh lectures also pose many additional questions. Who appointed Smith? How were his lectures advertised? How many attended, how much did they pay, and so on? See Rashid 2025, p. 674.

^[4] Stewart 1980, p. 272; EPS, I.11.

^[5] Rae 1965, p. 110, our emphasis.

^[6] Ibid., p. 111.

^[7] Ross 2010, p. 74.

^[8] Phillipson 2010, p. 72.

^[9] West 1969, p. 44.